About Me

Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

Monday, March 30, 2015

Sunday night, CNN aired another episode of “Finding Jesus”,
called “The True Cross”, about the hunt for remains of the cross upon which
Jesus was crucified. The main link for
the episode is here.

Much of the episode concerned the effort of Roman empress
Helena, in the 4th Century AD, to journey from Rome to Jerusalem and
locate the remains of the cross. She is
called the world’s first archeologist.
Her son, Constantine, would become Rome’s first Christian emperor,
despite his violence. He would be
baptized at the end of his life as an old man.

.

The Catholic Herald tells the story of Helena here. Here’s another story on the relics of
the crucifixion.

What followed was an inventory of emails on Hillary Clinton’s
server, and then an interview with a “Russian” about the proposed highway from
Moscow all the way to Sarah Palin’s Alaska, despite the economic sanctions.

Yes, if someone I know gets to host SNL, I’ll have to go,
and figure out how to get the tickets in time.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

NBC Dateline on Friday night reran “The Charleston Affair”,
a bizarre mystery that started when a police officer pulled over a suspicious
vehicle in Charleston, SC, and after arresting the man for an illegal weapon,
listed to the man’s story about his connection to hit on a wealthy woman, Nancy
Cannon, scheduled for divorce. The title of the episode conjures memories of Rhett Butler.

Her husband, Chris Latham, an executive with Bank of
America, had resisted the alimony part of the divorce

Latham had engaged in an office romance with a “poor” woman
from West Virginia and Ohio, who had worked as a stripper, and whose ex-husband
had underworld connections.

So the final trial, on them both, dealt with proving a
conspiracy, using elaborate high-tech records from cell calls and web
searches. Police are getting better at
monitoring Internet activity to detect and solve conspiracies, which walks the
privacy line. Scanning the Cloud could
be next.

Nancy’s children were pulled out of school, even from a
college in North Carolina, for their own protection.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Arthur Ravenel
Bridge, by BBatsel, link here under Creative Commons 2.5 Generic
License. I rode the bridge with friends
in 1990, a Citadel history professor and his wife, family friends.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Tonight, NBC Dateline, with Keith Morrison reporting, told
the story of “The Fugitive Millionaire”, John McAfee, founder of McAfee
anti-virus software, which used to be the most important of these companies
(along with Symantec Norton). McAfee, as
a younger man, was very determined to eliminate all computer viruses and worms
himself.

McAfee, born in 1945, lost a lot of his fortune in the real
estate bubble and moved to Belize, which is popular for retirees with low cost
real estate and little business regulation, and is relatively stable compared
to other Central American countries. The
documentary starts with a visit to his palatial estate “on the beach”, with its
guard dogs and security. He’s playing
Gershwin on the piano. It’s like a James
Bond movie opening (“three blind mice”).

But McAfee started having trouble with local police in 2012,
and his home was raided. Neighbors complained
about the dogs. Eventually, a neighbor
Gregory Viant Faull, was found shot execution style. McAfee was regarded as a person of interest,
and at one point sought political asylum in Guatemala. Eventually he returned to the US and lived in
several places, settling in Tennessee and starting a new security company in
Alabama.

But it’s ironic the documentary appears right after the
interesting Robert Durst.

It’s a bit of an ironic coincidence that a local church
sends a very active and effective youth group to a summer mission in Belize
(see Drama Blog, Nov. 4, 2012). The
social climate in the country seems to be interesting.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Great Blue Hole,
by USGS (pd).

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

On Tuesday, March 24, 2015 PBS aired its documentary “The
Vaccine War”, which was apparently its second airing. The main link is here and the entire film (53
minutes) is available now.

The film traced the history of vaccine resistance among
parents. One of the most important
observations is that younger parents today did not experience seeing people get
polio or diphtheria or the complications of measles.

Parents would say, “my child got several shots last month
and suddenly went downhill and wound up in special education.”

Other parents would object to the giving of vaccines for
what is normally an STD (hepatitis B or human papilloma). Another said that
getting sick is part of life and that she thought it was better for her kids to
get the diseases and overcome them. That leads to questions of states (like
Oregon) that in the past have been lenient with non-medical exemptions to
vaccinations.

But coincidence does not imply causality. Repeated studies
(the best ones done in Denmark) show no connection between the use of multiple
modern vaccines and the development of autism. Even the idea that the mercury compound used as a preservative (thimerosal) increases the risk of autism or other neurological disease was discredited.

The main ethical problem comes from the concept of “herd
immunity”. A given parent could decide
not to take the miniscule risk of vaccination if she knows that other parents
did have their kids vaccinated. That becomes an ethical problem, although this
is similar to other issues in the past with the military draft, maybe even the “chain-letter”
transmission of AIDS among gay men that the right wing tried to propagate in
the early 1980s.

So the issue becomes a test of individualism, and as to
whether “just taking care of one’s own family” is real individualism, or is
ethically desired.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, from NIH, often appears, discussing the
safety and effectiveness of vaccines in practice.

The documentary covered a bizarre case where a Washington
Redskins cheerleader developed neurological disease after vaccination.

It also pointed out the danger to kids with compromised
immunity due to chemotherapy if exposed to unvaccinated kids.

I had measles in 1950, just before my seventh birthday. Could some of my problems keeping up
physically been related to measles?

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

“Atheists: Inside the World of Non-Believers”, one hour,
started out by showing the ostracism some young adults faced after telling
their families they no longer believed in God.
It seemed clear that in many families, the energy driving the marriage
and the rearing of children seems to come from faith. A typical CNN link is
here.

On the other hand, rational adults don’t want to believe
something just because it is scripture, and because they were told by others in
family or peer group to believe it. Yet
some parents are quite insistent that there can be no argument with scripture.

In fact, the mathematics of cosmology and string theory may
indeed predict that consciousness associated with free will persists, and that
there must be an afterlife (although Stephen Hawking disagrees). It’s quite remarkable that the universe
progresses from strings or sub-atomic particles to conscious beings with free
will who can reverse entropy.

CNN has aired a commercial by little Ronnie Reagan for the
Freedom from Religion Foundation, and little Ronnie says he has no fear of
hell. But some other networks have
refused to air it.

The documentary features Dave Silverman (President, American
Atheists) which aired commercials on CNN before and after but not during the
show. Richard Dawkins and Jerry DeWitt
appeared.

The documentary featured a pastor who kept preaching even
though he says he no longer believes, and his voice was disguised.

I can remember a communion chant at MCC, “I’m a believer,
not a doubter.” There ought to be a movie titled "The Rapture of the Believers".

And some people have proselytized to me.

The documentary didn't mention the term "agnostic" which was often used when I was growing up.

The program also presented AtheistTV. I think that the deepest dualities inn our
ethical dilemmas – balancing the rights of the individual with stability for
the group, and deeper fairness, are addressed in all major religions.

Monday, March 23, 2015

First, he asked if India could sustain its population growth
(while richer countries have lower birth rates), and increase its standard of
living. But then he moved quickly into the middle of the country, into an area
with a tiger population, and covered the problem of poaching and declining
population of wild tigers.

Much of the poaching serves foreign interests, especially
Chinese. But the local population often
supports it, because of misperceptions about tiger attacks on humans. Wikipedia
has a factual piece on the problem There are appropriate ways to behave in an
area where tigers live. Most of us feel more empathy for tigers (who are more like "us") than sharks.

The documentary also covered the damage to the Taj Mahal
done over centuries by air pollution.

Sunday, March 22, 2015

CNN’s “Finding Jesus” series continued tonight with “James: Son
of Joseph, The Secret Brother of Jesus”, link.

The primary research concerns an ossuary, or bone box, on
display in Toronto in 2002, said to contain the remains of James. But later the man who sold the box would be
prosecuted in Israel for taking archeological items and then be acquitted for
forgery.

The ossuary may be the closest evidence we have to the
actual historical existence of Jesus.

A few novels have dealt with this matter, not only Dan Brown’s
“The Da Vinci Code”, but also some of Irving Wallace, especially “The Plot”.

James may have been a younger brother if Mary had biological
children by Joseph after Jesus, or he could be a more distant relative. The show went into some apocryphal gospels,
including “The Gospel of Thomas” and “The Gospel of the Hebrews”. It presented a narrative where Jesus saves
James life as a teen after a snake bite.

Jesus’s ministry would have created enormous tension within
Jesus’s birth family. Jesus actually
denied the need to maintain tribal loyalty to his origins.

Later James would come into conflict with Paul over Paul’s
ministry to Gentiles, divorcing Christianity from Jewish origins. The film covers James’s murder, and also
restages the funeral of Joseph around 27 AD.

Saturday, March 21, 2015

On Friday NBC Dateline aired “Deadly Twist”, the story of
the murder of Rachel Winkler by her husband Todd Winkler in an airpark
neighborhood (where people have private planes in their driveway) in the
eastern outskirts of Sacramento, Ca, on the edge of the wine country. Artist Don Hartfield, often seen teaching
painting on television (I’ve seen this) will raise his grandchildren by her.

The story has a strange twist. In 1999, a previous wife of
Todd would die in a bizarre camping fire “accident” in the north Georgia
mountains. The link to a typical story
is here.

Winkler, who would be sentenced to 26 years to life for
second degree murder, seemed to have a propensity to stage deaths of spouses to
collect money from insurance, and seemed prone to jealousy. Dateline did not
spend a lot of detail time on the trial.

Cinematically, the report (directed by Keith Morrison)
resembled “The Dark Place”, a somewhat similar mystery story in the Napa wine
estate country (actually in Oregon) with gay characters, and “The House of Adam”,
a Jorge Ameer film and another gay mystery with a lonely mountain road scene
(in the Tahoe country) that resembles a shot in the Dateline report.

Heterosexuals and homosexuals can generate similar “Hitchcock”
plots. It’s rather interesting to see
plots imagined by gay screenwriters actually happen in the real straight
world.

Dateline's crime reports, however, make for compelling viewing. The NBC staff really seeks out bizarre "real life" mysteries to match anything John Grisham could make up.

Friday, March 20, 2015

Morgan Spurlock’s season finale of “Inside Man” showed
Morgan working as a park ranger, mostly in Denali National Park, Alaska,
containing Mt. McKinley, the highest point in North America.

The film starts as he goes camping with his young son. Soon he goes to work, addressing the fact
that interest in National Parks among young people has diminished.

The highlight of the broadcast occurs when Spurlock rescues
himself from a glacier crevasse, using tricky rope work that he has been shown
only once. It’s like Army training. I couldn’t do that.

Spurlock also visited a rockslide site, and explained how
permafrost is melting because of climate change. He presented charts showing the loss of
glacial mass since 1900, along with comparative photographs. This was a bit like Al Gore’s “Inconvenient
Truth”.

The broadcast had started in Washington DC, and mentioned
that the White House is part of the Parks system. The budget for the Parks costs an individual
$4 a year. Most is supported by user
fees.

I flew over Denali in a private plane in 1980. I flew up to about 9000 feet along the slope of McKinley.

Thursday, March 19, 2015

On Thursday, March 19, 2015, NBC Dateline aired a news
special, “Robert Durst: Inside the Long, Strange Trip”. The
documentary had the advantage (compared to HBO’s) of knowing about Durst’s
arrest in New Orleans.

The broadcast outlined Robert’s early life in NYC, the
visits to Studio 54 (literally like in the 1998 movie “54”) and his wife’s
desire to be independent of him and go to med school. She disappeared.

Susan Berman’s death is said to have looked like a mob hit. The judge (Susan Criss) in the Galveston case said that the
state was “out-lawyered” and had been overconfident in the case. But the public is shocked at the depravity of
the alleged crimes.

The FBI is looking at other cases of missing persons where Durst could be implicated. He sometimes volunteered at shelters, and cross-dressed and hid his identity. Apparently there is a case of a female disappeared from Eureka, CA in 1997. His net worth was over $100 million.

Generally, lawyers believe that Durst’s bathroom confession
will turn about to be admissible.

The series has attracted controversy because Robert Durst
was arrested in a hotel in New Orleans, under warrant from the Los Angeles
Police Department, Saturday, one day
before the airing of the last interview. It’s also horrific that a man would have all
the privileges of wealth and apparently turn out to have become a serial
killer. He seemed to be prepared to live on the run and sometimes went into cross-dressing and gender bending, but only for disguise.

As the last episode ends, Durst, now 71, is talking to
himself in a hotel room (is that in NYC?) and mutters “What the hell did I do?
Killed them all of course.” Then the
film ends.

The history starts with the disappearance of his wife in
1982, and continues with the mysterious death of a friend, Susan Berman, in Los
Angeles in 2000. The last interview
focuses on handwriting and misspelling similarities between two letters
sent. The idea is that he could have
feared she knew something about the 1982 case. When he moved to Galveston, a neighbor was
murdered and dismembered, and he was acquitted in a trial in 2003, claiming
self-defense.

The filmmakers take a “meta film” approach. Garecki inserts himself into the film,
interviewing Durst, and often talks about the documentary process as part of
the film.

The film has opened a major debate on the responsibility of filmmakers, book authors and even bloggers when they discover crimes (or real terror threats) in the course of their work.

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

On March 13, CNN aired a half-hour documentary, “Spotlight:
Charles and Camilla”, about the second marriage each for Prince Charles and
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, main link here.

The couple married in 2005.
CNN’s Max Foster interviewed Charles at the castle at Aberdeenshire,
Scotland, which looks like a place in Middle Earth.

The couple recently toured the US and Camilla was shown
visiting a children’s charity near Louisville, KY.

Camilla does not like to be interviewed on her own. Charles did give a tribute to his wife from
his study during the interview.

Charles is quite active in environmental causes and has made
an environmental special for NBC before (called “Harmony”, Nov. 19, 2010).

The documentary also recalled the tragic death of Charles’s
first wife, Princess Diana, in 1997, which happened the weekend I moved to
Minneapolis to start a new job! I remember hearing about it in an
elevator.

Monday, March 16, 2015

Bill Weir’s “The Wonder List” on CNN continued Sunday night
with “Ikaria: The Island where People Forget to Die”. The main link ishere.

Ikaria is a rocky island in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Greece, part of
the country. It has little space for
natural harbors, so the residents have less contact with the outside world that
usual.

Weir introduced the place with the story of 67-year-old man
who returned to his ancestral homeland from New York, with terminal lung
cancer. He wound up living 37 years
longer.

The long lives in this “Blue Zone” are attributed to diet
and to extremely connected social structures through extended families.

People eat what they can pick, grow, or sometimes
catch. Mostly they eat vegan, but they
pig out about once every two weeks. The
diet contains lots of honey and anti-oxidant plant oils; lots of fruits, vegetables,
grains, and especially beans.

People tend to have many children, and elderly relatives
stay in family homes. But people keep working until 100; the maximum age for a small business loan is 102.

So the place seems a bit like an “intentional community”. People don’t pursue their own individual goals
for innovation, requiring their own contact with the rest of the planet, like
the rest of us do. People accept
extended social relations and intimacies within the family that many of us
would reject, and insist on being free to reject. People “take care of their own”, but the
reach beyond “their own” is limited.

Weir also visited Loma Linda, CA blue zone, largely
populated by Seventh Day Adventists, who have a lifestyle similar to Ikaria.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

The series does re-enact the “Judas Kiss” (which ironically
is also the title of one of the most important gay male dramas ever made, in
2011). Both Jesus and Judas are shown as
physically striking men, Judas with a very hairy chest. The actual kiss, to identify Jesus, for 30
pieces of silver, is almost “gay”. The
physical metaphor then sets up the theological and moral debate, something the
Bible belt can feast on.

The episode also looks at the 1978 finding of stone texts in
Egypt, gradually assembled to be the “The Book of Judas”, or, in fact, “The
Gospel of Judas”, which as a National
Geographic film on its own channel in 2006.
Was Judas doing what Jesus wanted him to do, to fulfill Jesus’s need to
be crucified so he could rise? Or was
there some “evil”?

Did Judas enter “The Cloud” or was that really Jesus? The Book also describes a dream where the
other disciples are engaging in debauchery (which unfortunately mentions
“unnatural relations”). They are rather
like the Israelites making the Golden Calf while Moses gets the Ten
Commandments. Not just Judas, but all
the disciples become “fallen angels” (a concept in my own manuscript, “Angel’s
Brother”, where there are exactly two).

The Gospel of Judas is seen as attacking the leadership of the new church in the decades following the Resurrection and Ascension.

The Gospel of Matthew is the only source of Judas Iscariot's hanging of himself.

Thursday, March 12, 2015

Wednesday night, CBS has started airing “CSI: Cyber”, a
series in which Patricia Arquette (from “Boyhood” and some David Lynch films)
stars as an FBI agent, Avery Ryan, tracking down cyber crimes.

Episode 2 of Season 1 for this series is titled “CMND Crash”. In Richmond, a horrific roller coaster crash
occurs, just as a young man is proposing marriage before the ride starts. The process control computer for the roller
coaster is completely off the Internet, but it turns out there are “dark web”
forums in which process control cards are auctioned and ordered, to support a “gore
porn” addiction.

Avery tracks down the group, and determines that the “club”
plans an event on the subway system in Boston.
The conclusion of the episode rather reminds one of “The Taking of
Pelham 1 2 3” from the 1970s. Charley
Koontz plays the super-geek at FBI quarters (rather reminding one of Jonah
Hill). Joe Reegan plays the would-be
groom who turns out to be a disturbing and improbable villain, somewhat of the
McVeigh mold.

There are a number of small companies in the US that make process control boards and that code the corresponding firmware, so this episode could seem disturbing to them.

I wondered about the idea of making Boston the focus of a
fictitious attack, given what happened at the Marathon in 2013, with the trial
going on right now.

There was a disturbing thriller by James Goldstone “Rollercoster”
back in 1977 from Universal, with Timothy Bottoms and George Segal, about an
extortion plot.

Wednesday, March 11, 2015

Tuesday night, CNN presented a special one-hour documentary,
“Miles O’Brien: A Life Lost and Found”, which is pretty well summarized by this
AP story here.

Dr. Sanjay Gupta hosted the story of one of CNN’s own
international journalists. O’Brien, 55,
had been reporting in southeast Asia and was in the Philippines in early
February, 2014. CNN’s own link is here.

On Tuesday, February 12, 2014 O’Brien had a freak accident
where a video case fell and hit his forearm.
He thought he had just an ordinary bruise. But in rare cases, the swelling from a large
contusion can choke off blood flow to the rest of the limb because it is
contained in connective tissue, called “compartment syndrome” (link).

Had the arm been fractured, he would have been better off,
because he would have sought medical attention immediately. It's unlikely that the outcome would have been different, when treatment was sought so late, even in the US.

Instead, he waited until there was severe pain. He went to shock because of blood poisoning
from the tissue death below, and the arm was amputated during surgery. He woke up, unable to believe what he had
seen. He spent nine days alone in a
hotel before he would tell anyone.

The rest of the film shows the rehab, especially long bike
rides for charity in Michigan.

The extreme nature of the syndrome is remarkable. We’ve all had deep bruises, that lead to
bumps and little discoloration at first, and then a greenish color that
spreads.

I had an ulnar fracture in September 1970 after falling off a bicycle when striking a pothole in a New Jersey parking lot. It was put in a cast and healed without incident.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Last night, I sampled the CBS series “Scorpion”, developed
by Nick Santora. The premise is that a
nerd genius Walter O’Brien (British actor Elyes Gabel) runs a company “Scorpion”
to help legitimate democratic governments deal with exotic threats around the
world, with contracts set up with the assistance of the Department of Homeland
Security (which it really does). It’s
easy to imagine what these could be, maybe like an EMP attack in “One Second
After”.

The episode Wednesday night, directed by Guy Ferland, was
titled “Once Bitten, Twice Die” (Season 1, Episode 18). The
team is present at a difficult negotiation in a former Soviet republic or
satellite, unnamed but probably Belarus.
Vladimir Putin is the unnamed threat. The president of the country gets
a poisonous snake bite. The team has to
figure out which species and build the right potion to stimulate antibodies to
the venom to save the president’s life.
The team is holed up but escapes, and has to steal a Taco truck
(something you don’t see good guys do often).
I don’t know if the medicine is real (maybe a “Jack Andraka Test” could
identify the venom – a premise for a future episode). The dialogue among the officials was
contrived and silly. Nevertheless, this
sort of stuff goes on. DHS (and other
agencies) actually do send consultants to former Soviet republics to help set
up defenses to infrastructure.

Monday, March 09, 2015

AE television has premiered its series “The Returned”, a
remake an older series in France “Les Revenants”. It is similar in concept to ABC’s “Resurrection”,
which was based on a recent novel titled “The Returned”. Another possible comparison is USA’s “The
4400”.

The series is set in a town in the British Columbia
Rockies. The scenery reminds one of "Twin Peaks".

The series pilot, “Camille”, a teenage girl Camille (India Ennenga)
has been lost for four years after an accident where a school bus had lost
control and fallen off a cliff. When she
returns, she surprises her mother (Tandi Wright), and says she woke up in the
woods and walked home for several hours and doesn’t remember the accident. The episode ends with a more detailed
recreation of the accident, where a mysterious little boy stands on the highway
curve, shortly after Camille had “gone all the way” with a boyfriend. She calls
her husband (Jack Pellegrino), who is at a local bar (which reminds me of a
place I visited in Mammoth Lakes, CA in 2012) and just asks him to “come home”.

The Pilot seemed interested in creating some violent
flashbacks for others who will return.

But advanced intelligence indicates that the series will
feature a lesbian pair, a doctor Julie Han (Sandrine Holt) and Nikki (Agnes
Bruckner) (“After Ellen” story here ) Another TV industry take is here

The question is whether John the Baptist is related to
Jesus, and whether Elizabeth was really Mary’s “cousin”? The documentary discussed bone samples found
in Bulgaria and a sample housed in a Kansas City museum that may belong to John
the Baptist.

But it is the story that is more interesting, An angel visits Mary, who goes to visit
Elizabeth, who also reported such a visit.
What is an angel, in biological terms, anyway?

John was himself a charismatic preacher in his own
right. And, as the documentary
indicates, the most interesting stuff happened in the countryside.

The film re-enacts the baptism of Jesus by John, and they
would never see each other again. John’s
speech would eventually get him imprisoned and beheaded – like in the Richard
Strauss opera “Salome”. That’s what
happens when people speak out in totalitarian states (whether theocratic or
secular), even when they’re right. The
documentary goes into detail as to what John wrote about. It’s like executing a blogger in any strict
Islamic country today. John would write
to Jesus and ask about loving and forgiving his enemies.

The film also documents the temptation of Jesus, by a man in
black (sounds like ISIS). The most
provocative is the last temptation, to throw himself of a cliff and be saved by
an angel. A physicist would say, wake up
in an alternate universe where he didn’t do it at all, as a result of quantum
luck

The skits seemed to focus on the quirky silly barracks
banter of my days at Fort Eustis. Maybe
somebody on SNL has read my stuff!

Hemsworth started out with irony, bragging that he almost
didn’t get parts as an actor because he was too perfect, too blond, too
muscular, and the like. Only on SNL.

Here goes (Disney Channel’s) “Brother 2 Brother”, as a
Chris-look-alike (Brooks Wheelan) goes to take a calculus test at Worthington High
School. But the brother isn’t an
identical twin (of Chris Hemsworth) as desired.
The teacher notes that "Chris" is smoother and somehow more "desirable." (She wouldn't like Jai Courtney.) I love the line, "He doesn't have that." They could have taken this in the direction of my own screenplay "The Sub".

Then the next episode features an actual live chicken, right
out of the Saturday morning cartoon series of the 1960s, “Chickenman”. That’s what I was called at Fort Eustis. “He’s everywhere”.

Let's not forget the opening skit impersonating Hillary Clinton telling all about her hiding behind personal email, Vox story by Tim Lee here. I have more about this on Wordpress here.

Friday, March 06, 2015

The NBC Dateline Report “In Broad Daylight (II)” this evening
gave us a truly Hitchcock-like case. Why
not call it “Hitman”? It’s almost out of
Paladin Press.

On Nov. 8. 2004, Lynn Schockner was murdered by knife in her
home in the Bixby Knolls area of Long Beach CA while police were outside,
summoned by a neighbor. The immediate killer
Nicholas Harvey, a steroid bobybuilder, caught by police. It became apparent quickly that this was no
ordinary residential burglary gone bad, like in a Coen Brothers movie. Wiretaps and a lot of detective work led to acquaintance
and underworld figure Frankie Jaramillo, who was paid $50000 by husband Manfred
Schockner to do the deed. The Long Beach
Press Telegram has a summary of the Dateline casehere.

A critical point in the investigation involved a restaurant
conversation and confrontation between Frankie and Manfred, just like a famous
scene with Al Pacino in the 1996 film “Heat”.
It turns out that “Frankie”, of somewhat indeterminate age, has become a
“fallen angel” in my novel “Angel’s Brothers” (the code word for the concept is
“client”, but I’ll get into all that another time – but the concept seemed to
have a counterpart in this particular case; watching this episode really does bring up an issue with my own fiction plot).

The star of the episode seems to be the teenage son, who would now be 24 and apparently works as an architect of theme parks.

NBC has used the same title (“In Broad Dylight (I)”) for a
different episode, about Amber DuBois, here. That may be reviewed another time. Apparently that title will be a sub-franchise on Dateline.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture of Long Beach Harbor author “D Ramey Logan WPPilot”, under
Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike license.
I was last there myself in February 2002 (but in LA, nearby, in
2012).

The beginning out like a typical Irving
Wallace novel from the 1960s (especially “The Plot”, which never got filmed as
far as I know – I loved the novel when in the Army). There are isolated stories around the world
(a kind of “Babel”). A boy is raised in
mysterious circumstances in New Mexico after learning he was lied to about his
parents. An orthodox Jew raises a red
calf in Norway.

But the main sequence of story concerns an FBI agent Peter
Connelly (Jason Isaacs), in Jerusalem to investigate a fugitive in a murder
case. He meets a young redhead (Alison
Sudol) working on an archeological dig.
When he investigates the murder victim’s apartment, he find a book by a
mysterious author in charge of the dig.
He also finds a curious paper diary with lots of drawings which he keeps
– it’s the kind of project book you’d make in grade school.

There’s a great foot chase scene through old Jerusalem near
the beginning that introduces many of the particulars. By the way, the agent sleeps with his boss
(Anne Heche).

It’s isn’t too hard to predict that the dig, involving the
Ark of the Covenant, is going to lead to some end-times prophesies. And there
will be people – religious fighters – very determined to see prophecy carried
out.

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

he film “Gay Muslims – UK”, from Channel 4 in Britain, from
2007, is available in six YouTube segments, starting with this one:

The film traces the histories of a number of gay teens and
young adults who grew up in Muslim enclaves in London. One young man gets
married and has a kid, but his wife finds out from rumor that he goes out with
other men and leaves him. But that would
not be uncommon anywhere. A young woman
says she is not invited by her extended family to visit them in Pakistan.

The documentary emphasizes that strict conformity to the
details of gender and marital roles is part of Muslim religious identity. One does not question whether rules are
“rational” or fair. They supposedly were
dictated by Allah for the supposed good and future of the entire tribe or
community.

Wikipedia attribution link for picture from London by
Aurulien Guichard and Bal Boris, under Creative Commons 2.0 Share Alike license

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

CNN has started a new series on Sunday nights for the Lenten
season, “Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery”, with the basic link here.

The first episode was “The Shroud of Turin”, and it fully documents the
garment found in the Fourteenth Century (there are several others, like one
found in Lirey, France. The documentary
reports the carbon dating that suggests the document was created about then, possibly
by a crude camera called the “camera obscura”, which actually could deposit a
negative on cloth using silver nitrate or carbonate, and urine (as a source of
ammonia).

However, there is another facial shroud in Spain. The Sudarium
of Oviedo, on the northwest coast of Spain, in Galicia (I have been to Bilbao, in
2001, to the East, in the Basque area).
The Sudarium actually matches the shroud.

There are many people who question the Carbon 14 dating on
the shroud, and believe the shroud may indeed have originated at the time of
the crucifixion.

The documentary covered a lot of details as to how the
crucifixion would have progressed, leading to suffocation, with the nails
through the wrists. It also covers the chronology of the handling of the body
and the garments as is known.

Sunday, March 01, 2015

Tonight, Bill Weir started his series “The Wonder List”,
which is something more positive than “The Bucket List” (which I have not
bothered to see). This is a series about
wonders of the world that may disappear in time because of sustainability issues,
or disruptive technologies. It's a bit in the style of Bourdain's "Parts Unknown".

Weir started the series with a visit to the Polynesian island
nation of Vanuatu, northeast of Australia (Wiki). Visitors can go closer to the crate
of an active volcano (Mount Yasur) than on any other place on Earth.

Weir noted the enormous cultural differences between this
country and most of the west. People
live in a tribal culture and emphasize simple agricultural, fishing and hunting
skills. Kids do not “need” advanced
educations.

Weir called the episode “Is There a Hawaii Without Hotels?” Well, there’s one, and they’re getting WiFi. The best link for the episode is here.

Weir visited the Galapagos Islands, which are more developed than I thought. but tourists have to do without a lot of luxury and are only allowed in certain areas. This is eco-tourism. The huge tortoise was a main attraction.

Bill's TV series news and reviews

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